Culture Fracturing from Information Filters

We can imagine that progress in human information-processing will face some usual social difficulties. Your angry “Klingon” relatives may find unexpected allies among “proboscically enhanced” (aka long-nosed) people protesting against using their alternative standard of beauty as a negative stereotype. The girl next door may be wary that your “re-clothing” filters leave her in Eve’s dress. Parents could be suspicious that their clean-looking kids appear to each other as tattooed...

 Birds to Reptiles

Because reptiles appear in the fossil record before birds, we can guess that the common ancestor of birds and reptiles was an ancient reptile, and would have looked like one. We now know that this common ancestor was a dinosaur. Its overall appearance would give few clues that it was indeed a “missing link”—that one lineage of descendants would later give rise to all modern birds, and the other to more dinosaurs. Truly birdlike traits, such as wings and a large breastbone for anchoring ...

 Vonnegut on Ibo Extended Family

I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who had six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family. They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty or how handsome it was. Wouldn't you have loved to be...

 The Importance of the Tribe in Parenting

Birth—before the advent of modern medicine—often resulted in the mother’s death. Though no one knows the true figure, estimates run as high as 1 in 8. Tribes with females who could quickly relate to and trust nearby females were more likely to survive. Older females, with the wisdom of their prior birthing experiences, could care for new mothers. Women with kids could provide precious milk to a new baby if the birth mother died. Sharing and its accompanying social interactions thus prov...

 The Tangled Bank Theory

Michael Ghiselin developed this idea further in 1974 and made some telling analogies with economic trends. As Ghiselin put it, "In a saturated economy, it pays to diversify." Ghiselin suggested that most creatures compete with their brothers and sisters, so if everybody is a little different from their brothers and sisters, then more can survive. The fact that your parents thrived doing one thing means that it will probably pay to do something else because the local habitat might well be full...